DNA Reveals Unique Ancestry Of Inhabitants Of The Angolan Namib Desert

Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – Africa is the birthplace of modern humans and the continent with the highest level of genetic diversity. While ancient DNA studies reveal some aspects of Africa’s genetic structure before the spread of food production, issues concerning DNA preservation have limited the insights from ancient DNA.

DNA Reveals Unique Ancestry Of Inhabitants Of The Angolan Namib Desert

Credit: Adobe Stock – the_lightwriter

Hoping to find clues in modern populations, researchers from a Portuguese-Angolan TwinLab ventured into the Angolan Namib desert—a remote, multi-ethnic region where different traditions met.

“We were able to locate groups which were thought to have disappeared more than 50 years ago,” says Jorge Rocha, a population geneticist from Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos (CIBIO, University of Porto) who led the fieldwork, together with Angolan anthropologists Samuel and Teresa Aço from the Centro de Estudos do Deserto (CEDO).

Among the communities the team encountered are the Kwepe, a pastoral group who used to speak a language known as Kwadi. “Kwadi was a click-language that shared a common ancestor with the Khoe languages spoken by foragers and herders across southern Africa,” explains Anne-Maria Fehn, a linguist from CIBIO who participated in the fieldwork and was able to interview what may well be the last two speakers of Kwadi.

“Khoe-Kwadi languages have been linked to a prehistoric migration of eastern African pastoralists,” adds Rocha, whose research focuses on southern African population history.

In addition, the team contacted Bantu-speaking groups that are part of the dominant pastoral tradition of southwest Africa, as well as marginalized groups whose origins have been ᴀssociated with a foraging tradition, distinct from that of the neighboring Kalahari peoples, and whose original language was supposedly lost.

Modern DNA research can complement ancient DNA studies

The team’s new study shows that the inhabitants of the Angolan Namib are quite divergent from other modern populations but also highly structured among themselves.

“In agreement with our previous studies on the maternally-inherited DNA, most genome-wide diversity segregates according to socio-economic status. A lot of our efforts were placed in understanding how much of this local variation and global excentricity was caused by genetic drift—a random process that disproportionally affects small populations—and by admixture from vanished populations,” says Sandra Oliveira, a researcher at the University of Bern in Switzerland who worked with these populations during her Ph.D. and post-doc studies with Rocha and Mark Stoneking at CIBIO and the Max Planck Insтιтute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany.

DNA Reveals Unique Ancestry Of Inhabitants Of The Angolan Namib Desert

Namib desert in the southwest of Angola. Credit: Sandra Oliveira

The team demonstrated that besides the high impact of genetic drift, which contributed to differences among neighboring groups of different socio-economic status, the descendants of Kwadi speakers and the marginalized communities of the Namib Desert retain a unique Pre-Bantu ancestry that is only found in populations from the Namib desert.

Mark Stoneking, who contributed to the earliest genome-wide studies on southern African foragers and participated in this study says, “Previous studies revealed that foragers from the Kalahari desert descend from an ancestral population who was the first to split from all other extant humans.

DNA Reveals Unique Ancestry Of Inhabitants Of The Angolan Namib Desert

Kuvale settlement in Virei, Namibe province of Angola. Credit: Sandra Oliveira

Our results consistently place the newly identified ancestry within the same ancestral lineage but suggest that the Namib-related ancestry diverged from all other southern African ancestries, followed by a split of northern and southern Kalahari ancestries.”

DNA Reveals Unique Ancestry Of Inhabitants Of The Angolan Namib Desert

The last two speakers of Kwadi. Credit: Jorge Rocha

With this new information, the researchers could reconstruct the fine-scale histories of contact emerging from the migration of Khoe-Kwadi-speaking pastoralists and Bantu-speaking farmers into southern Africa. Moreover, the study demonstrates that modern DNA research targeting understudied regions of high ethnolinguistic diversity can complement ancient DNA studies in probing the deep genetic structure of the African continent.

The study was published in the journal Science Advances

Written by Conny Waters – AncientPages.com Staff Writer

Related Posts

Andalusia Was First Inhabited By Neolithic People From The Southern Part Of The Iberian Peninsula 6,200 Years Ago

Andalusia Was First Inhabited By Neolithic People From The Southern Part Of The Iberian Peninsula 6,200 Years Ago

Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – The island of San Fernando, Cadiz in Andalusia, was home to the first Neolithic farmers and shepherds who decided to permanently settle there around 6,200 years ago. They practised shellfish collection and consumption all year round, with a preference for winter. Location of Campo de Hockey site in southern Iberian […]

Unknown Bronze Age Settlement Discovered Accidently In Heimberg, Switzerland

Unknown Bronze Age Settlement Discovered Accidentally In Heimberg, Switzerland

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Sometimes, when archaeologists look for one thing, they find something entirely different. This is exactly what happened in Switzerland when researchers were excavating, hoping to find an ancient Roman brick workshop, but they unearthed a previously unknown Bronze Age settlement instead. The excavation in Heimberg, on the right edge of […]

Unexplained Mystery Of The Dangerous Invisible And Unidentifiable Enemy In A French Town

Unexplained Mystery Of The Dangerous Invisible Enemy In A French Town

Ellen Lloyd – AncientPages.com – It was an ordinary day in a small, sleepy town in France. There were no indications anything strange was about to happen. Yet, an inexplicable and extraordinary event left the unsuspecting residents completely bewildered and unsure of what was unfolding. The situation that unfolded was indeed unusual, if not bizarre. […]

Rare 2,800-Year-Old Assyrian Scarab Amulet Found In Lower Galilee

Rare 2,800-Year-Old ᴀssyrian Scarab Amulet Found In Lower Galilee

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Erez Avrahamov, a 45-year-old inhabitant of Peduel, made an incredible discovery while hiking in the Tabor Stream Nature Reserve located in Lower Galilee. He stumbled upon an ancient seal shaped like a scarab that dates back to the First Temple period. Credit: Israel Antiquities Authority This ancient artifact is as […]

Dinas Powys: Late ‘Antique Hillfort Phenomenon’ In Post-Roman Western Britain

Dinas Powys: Late ‘Antique Hillfort Phenomenon’ In Post-Roman Western Britain

Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – Dinas Powys, Glamorgan, located about 9km southwest of Cardiff, is a small inland fort of approximately 0.35ha. The hillfort was first excavated by a team of archaeologists led by Leslie Alcock from 1954 through to 1958. The site is often referenced as a prime example of elite settlements in post-Roman […]

Puzzling Vasconic Inscription On Ancient Irulegi Hand Resembles Basque Language

Puzzling Vasconic Inscription On Ancient Irulegi Hand Resembles Basque Language

Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – A few years ago, archaeologists excavating an Iron Age site known as Irulegi in northern Spain discovered a flat bronze artifact shaped like a human hand. After careful cleaning, they found it bore inscriptions of words from a Vasconic language. This language family includes Basque and several other languages that […]